coolies

Noun

coolie (plural coolies)

1. An unskilled Asian worker, usually of Chinese or Indian descent; a labourer; a porter. Coolies were frequently transported to other countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries as indentured labourers.
   • One day when the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid had just arrived in the Cemetery, they saw some coolies breaking ground.1889, Rudyard Kipling, “At the Pit's Mouth”, in Under the Deodars, Boston: The Greenock Press, published 1899, page 52
2. (Caribbean, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad-and-Tobago, ethnic, slur) An Indian or a person of Indian descent.
   • Well, he and his troops had shown the koefietjies-the little coolies-how quickly and how easily Afrikaner explosive shells could knock it down.1991, Larry Bond, Patrick Larkin, Vortex, page 56